February 12 - April 18, 2026
everything was once something else is a solo exhibition by the 2025-26 Wanlass Artist in Residence Roksana Pirouzmand, an Iranian multidisciplinary artist currently living and working in Los Angeles. This exhibition of new works considers Pirouzmand’s ongoing inquiry into transformation, interconnectedness, and impermanence.
Exploring the materiality of clay and metal, both born of nature and shaped by fire, Pirouzmand considers their contrasting character—one absorbent, the other reverberant. Presented across two galleries—OXY ARTS and JOAN—the exhibition features a series of new sculptural works that are linked across the two venues through their vibration and sound. The works animate the often invisible kineticism of even the smallest movement, that can yield multi-sensorial ripple effects across time and space, giving form to our understanding of matter, energy and connection.
Pirouzmand creates sculptural objects and installations that perform in tandem with the artist’s body. Her recent works deal particularly with diasporic memory and forms of care and violence. In Pirouzmand’s pieces, personal experiences are incorporated into installation systems, suggesting the possibility of transformation, deterioration, and movement through interactions between the artist and her work. Pirouzmand is partly driven by a desire to reflect on the conditions of her life as an immigrant, depicting intimate narratives of her experience as an Iranian woman living in the United States. The use of clay and water reflects on the gradual deterioration or perhaps the fluidity of family ties across diasporas. Her installations often involve mechanisms that animate objects through the pulsing presence of her body or sculptural works cast from either her body or those of her mother or grandmother, honoring the lives of the women who have preceded her. Creating the conditions for her work to be in motion, Pirouzmand's pieces collide into narratives of exile, family bonds, generational trauma, and memorialization.
This exhibition and related programming are made possible by generous support from the Kathryn Caine Wanlass Charitable Foundation.
